The Sentimental Education of the Novel / Margaret Cohen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cohen, Margaret, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women and literature--France--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

French fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

French fiction.

Sentimentalism in literature.

French fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vi, 219 p. :) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The nineteenth-century French novel has long been seen as the heroic production of great men, who confronted in their works the social consequences of the French Revolution. And it is true that French realism, especially as developed by Balzac and Stendhal, was one of the most influential novelistic forms ever invented. Margaret Cohen, however, challenges the traditional account of the genesis of realism by returning Balzac and Stendhal to the forgotten novelistic contexts of their time. Reconstructing a key formative period for the novel, she shows how realist codes emerged in a "hostile take-over" of a prestigious contemporary sentimental practice of the novel, which was almost completely dominated by women writers. Cohen draws on impressive archival research, resurrecting scores of forgotten nineteenth-century novels, to demonstrate that the codes most closely identified with realism were actually the invention of sentimentality, a powerful aesthetic of emerging liberal-democratic society, although Balzac and Stendhal trivialized sentimental works by associating them with "frivolous" women writers and readers. Attention to these gendered struggles over genre explains why women were not pioneers of realism in France during the nineteenth century, a situation that contrasts with England, where women writers played a formative role in inventing the modern realist novel. Cohen argues that to understand how literary codes respond to material factors, it is imperative to see how such factors take shape within the literary field as well as within society as a whole. The book also proposes that attention to literature as a social institution will help critics resolve the current, vital question of how to practice literary history in the wake of poststructuralism.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. Reconstructing the Literary Field

CHAPTER 1. Conflicting Duties: Sentimental Poetics

CHAPTER II. The Novel Is a Young Man of Great Expectations: Realism against Sentimentality

CHAPTER III. The Heart and the Code: George Sand and the Sentimental Social Novel

CHAPTER IV. A Compromised Position: French Realism and the Femme Auteur

Select Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-209) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691188249

0691188246

OCLC:

1132218325